Dr. Linda Gleis is a physician at the Louisville Veterans Administration Medical Center; she recently retired as the Chief of Rehabilitation Medicine service there after 29 years. She previously directed the residency training program in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Frazier Rehab Center and was a co-founder of Rehabilitation Associates, a physician group practice. She also holds the distinction of being the first woman president of the Jefferson County Medical Society (now the Greater Louisville Medical Society), a post she held from 1991-92.
It’s an impressive résumé, and she gives a lot of the credit to her professors at Bellarmine – not just for preparing her well for medical school, but for encouraging her to consider it in the first place.
Linda’s major at Bellarmine was medical technology. “At that time, we had the same curriculum as the pre-med students until senior year, when it was a bit different,” she said. “My chemistry professors were very encouraging of looking beyond my med-tech degree to medical school. Then, when I was doing my med tech internship at St. Anthony’s Hospital, the instructors there were like, ‘Why don’t you go to medical school?’ Between my junior and senior years, I started thinking, ‘Well, maybe I will go to med school.’ ”
After graduating cum laude from Bellarmine in 1974, she did just that, earning her medical degree at the University of Louisville.
Throughout her career, she has stayed connected with Bellarmine. She has served on the Board of Overseers and currently serves as a mentor in the Alumni Career Consultant Program. She was named Bellarmine’s Alumnus of the Year in 1991. Her eldest son Eric, one of the four children she had with her husband, Dr. Gregory Gleis, earned his undergraduate and MBA degrees at Bellarmine, and their third son, Kevin, is a student at the university.
She and Greg are longtime supporters of education efforts, she said, “and I’m active on the board of the Catholic Education Foundation as well. We’ve always contributed to Bellarmine, and we decided that going forward, we would set up a scholarship.”
The scholarship is for a full-time sophomore, junior or senior who demonstrates financial need. If awarded to a sophomore the award is for six semesters; to a junior, for four semesters; and to a senior, for two. “We want to give more students the opportunity to have a wonderful value-based education experience like the one I had,” Linda said.
She also had the help of a scholarship, but on a much smaller scale, she said with a laugh. “When I graduated from Assumption, Bellarmine was offering a scholarship to the top 10 percent of the class, and I received one of those.” The amount? Fifty dollars.